While he was still at Mrs Blodgett’s home, Alice Hansborough had once suggested that he come and stay with them. The Meads were a family of modest means and lived in a rented house in South Pasadena area. Mrs Hansborough did mention to the Swami that their house was very simple. “I don’t need luxury,” Swamiji had said and mentioned that he was then quite comfortable at Mrs Blodgett’s place. But he did readily accept the invitation for dinner on the Christmas eve, which also happened to be a Sunday, and asked that Miss MacLeod be invited too. When Alice asked Miss MacLeod, the latter would not believe Swamiji had accepted the invitation. She herself went to ask him about it, and he told her, “Yes, and you are to come too.”
The Meads’ house was about an hour’s ride on the electric train from the Blodgett’s house in Los Angeles. Mrs Hansborough later described the time Swamiji first stepped into their home with great details. “The train stopped just at the corner, and then they had only a few steps to our door. After speaking to each of us as he came in, Swamiji turned and walked into the living room. The tall windows looked out through the trees in our garden. Swamiji walked to one of them and stood for some minutes looking out, the white curtains framing him against the sunlight. Then he turned and spoke, answering again the question I had asked him at Mrs. Blodgett’s: ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I will come to visit you!’”
Swamiji came to stay with the Mead family on 25th January. He had but one trunk, but many clothes, for he was always well dressed when he went out or met strangers. He used to say, “In India I can exist on hips and haws and live in rags, but here I want to meet your demands.”
During Swamiji’s stay the three sisters and Miss MacLeod (who too had come for a few days), all slept in the larger of the two front bedrooms downstairs, while Swamiji’s bedroom was on the second floor. Their father, Mr Mead, who was 84 then, too slept downstairs. Ralph, (Carrie’s seventeen-year-old son) had the smaller front bedroom, and Miss Fairbanks (the housekeeper) and the four year old Dorothy (Alice’s daughter) in the attic. Even though there were many people living in the house, Swamiji could live as he wanted, free of any formality and among those who understood him well.
From Alice’s descriptions of Swamiji’s stay at their home we can picture how he spent his entire day quiet vividly. “He would come down about seven in the morning, in his bathrobe and slippers and his long black hair not yet combed. He would have some kind of undergarment under his robe, which showed a bit at the neck. I remember that his robe had seen many winters. It was a black and white tweed of some kind, probably with a herringbone pattern in it, and with a cord around the waist.
“Though he was very careful about his dress when he went out, he was very careless about it at home. I remember that he himself remarked about it one Sunday morning: ‘Why should I be careful of my dress at home? I don’t want to get married!’ You see, where we think there is a ‘proper’ dress for the dining room, just as for other times and places, he put all this down as show. Once while my nephew Ralph was blacking his shoes, he remarked, ‘You know, Ralph, this fine lady business is a nuisance!’”
Breakfast would be at about seven thirty, as Helen, the youngest sister had to rush for work to Los Angeles where she worked as a secretary in an insurance firm, and Ralph too had to go to school. Swamiji would pass the half hour walking outside in his bathrobe itself – during those days there was hardly anyone in that area as there was no habitation around the place.
Alice remembered that Swamiji was a moderate eater and usually he took two eggs, two pieces of toast, and two cups of coffee. “Once I offered him a third cup of coffee,” she recalled. “At first he declined, but when I urged him he finally yielded and said: ‘All right. Woman’s business is to tempt man.’”
While Ralph and Helen used to quickly leave after their breakfast, Alice, Carrie and Swamiji, never rushed through the meal. On days when he did not have any morning class, Swamiji would stroll the garden or browse through the library. He chatted or played with small kids – Dorothy and her friends. Often, he sat observing them play. Child training was an area which interested him a lot. He did not believe in punishment. It had never helped him, he used to say. “I would never do anything to make a child afraid,” he used to say. He hugely admired Lewis Carrol and said that Carroll had some kind of intuition, that his was not an ordinary mind, to have written books like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass’.
For lunch there was lamb and vegetables. Swamiji particularly liked peas. They would have fruit as the dessert at lunch. He was especially fond of grape.
On days when he had morning classes (generally scheduled at ten-thirty or eleven) he would leave the house around ten. Alice recalled, “He wore the black garment we see in several pictures of him, something like a clerical frock, but looser. Sometimes if it was not too warm he would wear his overcoat over this. He would take his gerua robe and turban in a suitcase, and put them on when he arrived at the meeting place.”
When Swamiji first came to Los Angeles, his hair had grown long and beautifully curly. They looked so good on him that the Mead sisters and other friends would not let him cut it again, a demand Swamiji acceded to.
Swamiji often engaged in conversations with Ralph. He too enjoyed the Swami’s company and attended to many of Swamiji’s little chores like shining his shoes. Swamiji would say, “Ralph, my tobacco,” and Ralph would go up to his room and bring it down. Swamiji usually smoked his pipe after meals. Once he asked Ralph, “Can you see your own eyes?” Ralph answered no, except in a mirror. “God is like that,” Swamiji told him. “He is as close as your own eyes. He is your own, even though you can’t see him.”
Swamiji was quite sensitive to heat, even though he was unbothered by cold. The Mead family always had a fire in the grate after dinner in the evening, and once when it had gone out, Swamiji exclaimed, “Praise the Lord, that fire’s out.”
Swamiji loved ice-cream but disliked guavas. The Meads always had a plate of spring fruit on the table, and on one evening there were some guavas among others fruits. Mrs Hansborough remembered that then they were discussing about Lent and the custom of giving up some favourite food or pleasure during the forty days. Swamiji said that a similar custom existed in India which was always observed by the monks. “All but the wicked fellows like me renounce something,” he said. “Now I, for example, will renounce these guavas!” The Meads took the hint and did not have guavas anymore after that.
On some days, when there were no lectures or classes, Swamiji, the Meads and any others who cared to join went on to near-by hill-tops for their little picnics. They would spend hours together there with Swamiji talking on spiritual subjects. He sometimes took his small group classes there. There was one instance when Swamiji became so absorbed in some subject he was discussing that he talked for six hours without interruption, from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. “The air,” Mrs Hansborough later recounted, “was just vibrant with spirituality by the time it was over.”
On one such picnic at this hill-top, a young woman Christian Scientist (practitioners of Christian Science – who believe in and undertake healing through faith), Lillian Davis, was arguing with him that people should be taught to be good. Swamiji smilingly asked, “Why should I desire to be good?” and waving his hand to indicate the trees and the countryside he said, “All this is His handiwork. Shall I apologize for His handiwork? If you want to reform John Doe, go and live with him; don’t try to reform him. If you have any of the divine fire, he will catch it.”
Dinner would be around six-thirty. The Meads would usually have soup, either fish or meat, vegetables, and a dessert like pie which Swamiji liked. He generally did not take coffee in the evening. In the late afternoons Swamiji would help Carrie Wycoff prepare dinner and often he himself cooked the whole meal. Always fond of cooking since his young days – indeed he had once remarked that one cannot be a good Sadhu if one does not cook well – he liked to prepare one meal every day while he was there. He cooked curries and chapatis, which were relished by Ralph and Dorothy. He sat on the kitchen floor cross-legged with a wooden bowl for grinding the ingredients which he used. He did not like to stand beside the table for doing that. After finishing with the grinding, he would fry the spices in butter. He used to forewarn the sisters about the distressful smoke : “Here comes grandpa, ladies are invited to leave.”
After the dinner was over, the sisters would clear the dining room table, light a fire in the open grate, and sit there. The Swami would sit on an easy-chair, large enough for him to sit cross-legged. He usually wore a dinner jacket, smoking jacket or his robe. During this time he often read out to those present. Alice found him to be an excellent reader. She said, “People used to ask where he got his fine pronunciation of English. He himself used to say that it came after he reached the United States. He said that until he came to the United States he had a ‘bookish accent’.” In those conversations Swamiji also exhibited great interest in all phases of the American national life. He did not quite like the great concentration on material affairs and thought that the American civilization would fall within fifty years if it did not undergo not a transformation anchored on spirituality .
In Pasadena Swamiji also visited the Throop Polytechnic Institute and Manual Training School which was founded just nine years back. It later evolved into one of world’s leading universities, the California Institute of Technology, popularly called Caltech. At that time it offered courses in Sloyd (woodwork), mechanical and architectural drawing, clay modelling, forging, designing, machine design and had laboratories fot Biological, Physical and Chemical Sciences, and also Electricity. It then had just over three hundred students on its roll. Incidentally, Sister Nivedita too was very impressed by many of its methods, particularly Sloyd, and sought to employ that as an educational practice in India.
Swamiji was not particularly keen on going to distant places merely for sight-seeing. When once Helen Mead suggested him to visit some such places in the region, he said, “I have seen the Himalayas and so no other sights hold any charm for me. But tell me about a great man and I will walk a hundred miles to see him.”
Swamiji would sometimes give private interviews in the afternoons or talk with visitors who came to see the Mead sisters. Yet he was by no means always in a mood for conversation. Once a lady who was a friend of the family visited. The Mead sisters chatted with the guest for more than an hour while Swamiji sat in the parlour with them, smoking his pipe in perfect silence. The visitor had no idea who he was and the Meads also did not feel the need to introduce him.
While leaving the lady inquisitively asked the sisters whether the gentleman spoke English. While we do not know how the Sisters answered this question, we know that later, they along with Swamiji had a hearty laugh over this.
There was also the instance of a woman who wanted to do Swamiji’s portrait. She had approached him several times but Swamiji did not show any interest. The woman then visited the Meads’ home and asked Mrs. Hansborough if she could help in letting her do his portrait unawares. About this Alice later recalled, “Somehow Swamiji sensed her presence and called me. ‘You get that woman out of here or I’ll leave!’ he told me. Needless to say, I saw her to the door.”
Swamiji also spent a lot of time with the eldest Mead sister – Carrie Wycoff, who after having lost her husband lived with the family. He would often join her in cooking and also stroll with her in the garden. An excellent singer, he would sing several songs, explaining them in a much more personal way than he would from a lecture platform. Sometimes he would sing the Christian hymn : ‘The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone.” He would laugh singing that and say “I am a heathen.”
Alice recounted that once while Carrie was preparing something in the kitchen for Swamiji, he was walking to and fro and suddenly he asked her, “Were you happily married?” For a moment she hesitated, then answered, “Yes, Swamiji.” He left the kitchen for a moment, and then came back. “I am glad”, he said dryly, “that there was one!”
Once Swamiji had prepared some dish for Carrie to try. When asked whether she liked it she said she did. After a moment’s pause, perhaps doubting the veracity of the response, he inquired again, “Was it true, or just for friendship’s sake?” and Carrie replied, “I am afraid it was for friendship’s sake.”
He used to tell Carrie, “Madam, you work so hard that it makes me tired. Well, there have to be some Marthas, and you are a Martha,” referring to the Biblical character of Martha – the sister of Lazarus and Mary — who was always engaged in housekeeping and serving Jesus and is considered as an epitome of service and hospitality.
An incident of profound importance involving Carrie occurred when once during those days she was coming down the stairs from the second floor of the house along with Swamiji. At one step she lost her balance and became unsteady. As a reflex, she placed her arm on Swamiji’s shoulder and regained her balance. She later described that just upon touching him she felt that her mind had gone to another level of consciousness. She retained this mood when all of them sat down for dinner and was lost in some other world. Just an accidental touch and banking on Swamiji’s shoulder transported her to a spiritual experience, the mood and memory of which she retained whole of her life.
But perhaps the most extraordinary incident involving Carrie Wycoff occurred many years after Swamiji had passed away from the world of mortals. Swamiji had a habit of leaving some personal item he had used at every place he stayed. Sometime before he left the Mead house for San Francisco he said to the sisters, “I always leave something wherever I go. I am going to leave this pipe when I go to San Francisco.” He left it on the mantelpiece in the living room, and they kept it there for a long time as an ornament. One day, many years later, Carrie, who for some time, had been suffering from a painful illness involving a severe nervous ailment, went and picked up Swamiji’s pipe in a very depressed mood. As soon as she picked it up she heard in her mind Swamiji’s voice speaking to her, “Is it so hard, Madam?” She then rubbed the pipe across her forehead, and instantly the suffering left her, with a feeling of well-being coming over her. After the incident the other two sisters decided that after this Carrie should rightfully have the pipe. That pipe is now preserved in the Vedanta Society of Hollywood.
Carrie’s was not an easy life. She also lost her only son Ralph who died tragically in an accident at the age of 42, around 1925. Thereafter, she played an instrumental role in the nascent stage of Vedanta Society of Hollywood after Swami Prabhavananada came to Los Angeles area in 1930. She had a summer home in Hollywood at Ivar Avenue off the present-day bustling freeway. It was here that Swami Prabhavananda used to deliver his lectures and also hosted at first. She also gifted her flower garden on the adjoining plot of land for a permanent ashrama and at which site the Temple was erected in 1938. She passed away in 1949.
Devotees of the centre remembered Carrie Wycoff as ‘a small, elderly lady, often dressed in old-fashioned lavender, with a white knitted shawl, serenely moving about the premises.’ To the devotees she often spoke of Swami Vivekananda. It was believed that she had Swamiji’s vision when she left her body. She was like a mother-figure to Swami Prabhavanada who considered her a saintly figure.
Dorothy and Ralph were also direct recipients of Swamiji’s benediction. Alice recounted a special occasion, “It must have been one morning that Swamiji gave what I call ‘baptism’ to Dorothy and Ralph. I remember he laid his pipe aside and called Dorothy to him. Dorothy was four years old at the time. She went and stood between his knees, with her hands on his thighs. Swamiji put his hands at the back of her head where the hair joins the neck, and tapped up and over the top of her head to the eyebrows. Then he called Ralph and did the same thing. Ralph must have knelt, because I remember that Swamiji did not leave his seat. ‘What is the meaning of this, Swami?’ I asked. Usually I never questioned him, but I did ask him this. ‘Oh, it is just a custom we have in India” was all he would tell me.”
Grace Unbounded
Alice mentioned that the sisters themselves felt as if Christ was among them, and who was their very own. She recalled, ‘Swamiji had marvellous patience with us. He took away any feeling on our part that he was superior to us…I felt as though he was someone to whom I was closely related, someone whom I had not seen for a long, long time, and who had been a long time coming.
In fact Alice Hansborough was always inclined to remember Vivekananda as the real human being he was and take off, in her own words ‘any paint of artificiality’ others tried to apply to him. In her words, “he was so great in himself that no paint was ever needed to make him so.” She also remembered the great simplicity which Swamiji had. She recalled that “he put one right on a level with himself. He said to me, ‘You have no reverence.’ When I told this to Swami Turiyananda, he remarked. ‘Yes, he said that, but he was pleased that you did not have reverence. Where there is equality there is exchange of perfect love. Where there is no superior and inferior you have that perfect union.’”
Swamiji was well aware of the special bond that the Mead sisters had with him. Much later when he was in the Bay Area, he said to Alice while waiting for a train, “I have known all three of you before!” Also, during the same time, on March 17th, he wrote to Mrs Leggett, “Mrs Hansborough, the second of the Mead sisters is here, and she is working, working, working, to help me. Lord bless their hearts. The three sisters are three angels, are they not? Seeing such souls here and there repays for all the nonsense of this life.”
The devotion that the everyone in the Mead family had for Swamiji and how it became more and more fortified with years is an inspiring tale. One instance concerning Dorothy in her more mature years is an illustration. Decades after Swamiji’s departure, Helen Mead once complainingly asked Dorothy why she did not quite attend the lectures at the then well-established local Vedanta Society. Dorothy gave a sharp look at her, as if almost surprised at the inanity of the question, and said, “Don’t you know I have sat on the lap of Swamiji.” These words reveal the deep sense of ever-etched grace and belongingness to Swamiji that they always carried in their hearts.
Plan to move to Northern California
After one of the lectures at the Shakespeare Club, probably in second half of January i.e. even before Swamiji had come to stay at the Meads’ home, Alice said to him, “Swamiji, I think you would like me to go on to San Francisco.” She recalled that upon hearing this “Swamiji’s eyes lighted up as they always did when he was particularly interested in something and he answered, ‘Yes, of course I would.’”
However, the other two sisters, Helen and Carrie, did not think much of the idea as they were hardly sure that Alice could manage the affairs on her own in that area and thus discouraged the enterprise from the beginning. “They did not feel that I was a “big” enough person to do what was necessary,” Alice recalled. They did not consider her enough ‘socially inclined’ which they felt was an essential requirement for the success of the effort, nor did they think she was bright enough for the task. As a result of this, Alice lost her enthusiasm and did not initiate any action on that front.
But events were to take a different turn. One morning after the breakfast at home, when Alice had been sitting with Swamiji at the dining table, the latter brought the matter up again and asked, “Well, when are you going to San Francisco?” Alice was taken a little by surprise, as she had more or less abandoned the thought by then. “Why, I could go, if you wanted me to,” she answered. Swamiji seemed to have sensed that she had felt discouraged by the opinions of her sisters. “When once you consider an action,” he said, “do not let anything dissuade you. Consult your heart, not others, and then follow its dictates.”
Just some days later, a letter arrived from Dr. Benjamin Fay Mills of the Unitarian Church in Oakland in the Bay Area, inviting Swamiji for some lectures there. With this unexpected development Alice hinted that there was possibly no need for her to accompany Swamiji as all then seemed to be nicely arranged. However, Swamiji wanted to go ahead with his work in an independent manner, and was particularly reluctant to start the work there with a lecture at the Unitarian Church depending only on them. “I am willing to trust an American woman. I will trust an American man sometimes. But an American minister – never!’ This was because of several unpleasant experiences he had during his first visit to America when he was selfishly used by others (many of them posing as liberal clergymen) for furthering their agenda with hardly any interest in his own mission.
Boosted by Swamiji’s faith in her, Alice took upon herself the task of planning and rolling out the work in the Bay Area. She told him to give her a week before his arrival so that she would get a place for him to stay and line up some possible lectures and the venues. She got in touch with her circle of old friends and acquaintances, particularly those who were interested in what in those day was fashionably labelled as “New Thought” and found sufficient interest on their part in setting up Swamiji’s lectures. However, much to her chagrin, she later discovered that the motive for many was to publicise themselves through this. She had managed to arrange Swamiji’s stay at the Home of Truth at 1231 Pine Street in San Francisco.
Thus after spending three months in Los Angeles area Swami Vivekananda was to set foot in Bay Area of Northern California. His most powerful phase as a great spiritual teacher would unfold here. The world would be enriched for several centuries by the luminous presence and words, indeed a refreshingly new gospel given out by this Messenger of Light in this corner of the globe.
▶Next Chapter: The World Teacher sets foot in Northern California